Activists Pray, Risk Arrest at White House Protest
Plus: A CW priest's path from ego to empathy; FBI releases Y-12 protest record; Iowa CW celebrates a win; and advice for struggling activists.
Do Not Depend on the Hope of Results
In this issue you’ll read stories of Catholic Workers finding success in their work, as in the case of the fight against anti-immigrant legislation in Iowa. You’ll also find stories of CWs confronting a reality of continued suffering as they call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Yet in our A Few Good Words section, Thomas Merton tells us not to depend on the hope of results, but rather to focus on the value of the work itself. He calls us to “struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people… in the end it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”
Catholic Workers at the forefront of activism are often faced with failure in a culture that tells us we should only be concerned with ourselves. But as Father Thomas Lumpkin reminds us, we are not independent of one another, but rather interconnected. Branches of the same vine.
The bells ringing from the church around the corner remind me that I need to step away from the computer and get back to the reality of personal relationships -- in this case only a grocery store run with roommates. I hope you got as much out of the stories this week as I did.
Zak
Your letters
We’ve received a handful of reader letters in the last few weeks. They’re too long to publish here, but we thought you might find them interesting: one is from a Trappist monk who came to know the Catholic Worker in an unusual way, and the other is from a friend of the CW who describes how he is living sustainably in the Pyrenees mountains. You can read them here. Your letters are always welcome; reply to this email or send letters with the subject line “CW letter” to info@catholicworker.org.
What you said…
Last week, we asked about the usefulness of our Catholic Worker Calendar. Here’s what you said:
Look for our next reader poll later in this newsletter.
Correction
In last week’s issue, the photo of Catholic Workers protesting the New York City air raid drills was incorrectly dated to 1955. Long-time CW archivist Phil Runkel wrote to set us straight: “Please note that the photo of DD, Ammon, and others sitting on the park bench in Washington Square was taken at the time of the second Operation Alert in June 1956 by the well-known poet Robert Lax.”
FEATURED
Activists Call for Ceasefire, Risk Arrest at White House
Some 21 activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza risked arrest during a demonstration in front of the White House on March 6. The multifaith demonstration was organized by Christians 4 Ceasefire, which is co-sponsored by the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker (Washington, D.C.). Activists called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
About 100 demonstrators gathered in Lafayette Park, then moved to Pennsylvania Avenue and continued to the sidewalk in front of the White House, where participants from Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities offered prayers. Several activists hung a banner on the White House fence proclaiming: “Muslims-Christians-Jews Cry Out: Ceasefire Now.”
Throughout the event, attendees engaged in singing, and members of the Stones Cry Out Delegation shared their experiences in Palestine. Among the speakers was Philp Farah from the Palestinian Christian Alliance for Peace, who shared the story of his 84-year-old relative, Elham Farah. She was fatally shot by an Israeli sniper outside the Holy Family Church in Gaza.
The group later moved to block a White House checkpoint entrance, then obstructed three intersections at Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street. The Secret Service responded by closing off parts of the intersection and rerouting traffic, but no arrests were made.
You can read more and watch a video of the event at CatholicWorker.org.
From Ego to Empathy: A Priest's Spiritual Evolution as a Catholic Worker
Looking back on his choice to join the seminary after high school, Father Tom Lumpkin regards it as a decision filled with ego. “I wanted people to look at me and respect me and admire me. I wanted to be a priest in a self-centered way.”
Now, more than fifty years after entering the seminary, his teenage wish for the admiration of others has come true. Lumpkin is a local legend in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. But a lot has changed for Lumpkin in those decades, and now he can only chuckle at the arrogance of his younger self, and marvel at how far he’s come on his spiritual journey.
Lumpkin has shared living space with the homeless for nearly fifty years, opening the doors of the Detroit’s Day House Catholic Worker in 1976 to those who would otherwise be sleeping on the streets. For most of that time, he got up at the crack of dawn four days a week to serve coffee and hot meals to those in need at Manna Meal soup kitchen, which he also co-founded in 1978.
Day House recently announced its closing, although the soup kitchen will carry on. Lumpkin still serves breakfast at Manna Meal twice a week.
These days, Lumpkin regards his faith as a spiritual journey. And he sees Jesus’s message in a different, much more radical light as well.
“The culture tells us we are all independent, we really just focus on ourselves. What underpins Jesus’s teachings is that we are not independent creatures, we are interdependent creatures.”
Lumpkin’s favorite image of our interdependency comes from John 15, when Jesus tells us that he is the vine and we are the branches. While we may be distinct from God, the Earth, or each other, we are not separate because we are all branches of the same vine.
“Once you realize that, then you find your security, not in just looking out for yourself, or getting more money or more esteem, but trying to deepen the ties between you and the Earth, and other people and God. You grow more and more mature, more and more secure, by deepening the ties between yourself and others in your life.”
You can read Zak Sather’s full story on Fr. Lumpkin at CatholicWorker.org; you can also check out the Thomas Merton letter that inspired Fr. Lumpkin at the end of this newsletter.
FBI Unseals Records from 2012 Transform Plowshares Now Action
Newly released FBI records show that security firm employees believed three peace activists had inside help breaching the security perimeter at the Y-12 uranium processing facility near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, according to an in-depth report from Knox News.
In the 2012 Transform Plowshares Now action, Sacred Heart Sr. Megan Rice and two Catholic Workers, Greg Boertje-Obed and Michael Walli, cut through security fences at the Y-12 nuclear processing facility, evading guards and security cameras as they made their way to the heart of the complex. The action caused a global sensation at the time, closing the facility for two weeks while officials reviewed security protocols and investigated the breach. Congressional hearings ensued, two security contracts were terminated, and plans were laid to build new, more secure facilities.
The FBI conducted dozens of interviews with current and former employees of the security firm following the breach. After analyzing the newly released 463-page FBI file on Rice, Knox News reports that most of the employees were so shocked by the breach that they believed the three activists had to have had help from the inside. However, when the paper recently interviewed the two surviving activists (Sr. Rice died in 2021), they flatly denied the idea.
"We had no conversations with Y-12 employees," Boertje-Obed told the paper on March 7. "If a company is doing something that is against God's will, they cannot protect it. They cannot guard it. Other people will be able to get in if you're doing something against God's will."
Read the entire report at Knox News: Y-12 break in 2012: FBI unseals file from Oak Ridge breach
Every Land is a Holy Land
In the latest issue of the Embracing Repair newsletter, Brenna Cussen Anglada (St. Isidore Catholic Worker Farm, Cuba City, Wisconsin) writes about how her encounter with Israeli Zionists helped her translate her work with oppressed Palestinians to the decolonization work she does now:
The remnants of our meal of hummus, falafel, pita bread, and yogurt remained on the restaurant table in the Old City of Jerusalem as my Israeli friend Chaim asked me to tell his friends why I had come to visit the Holy Land. It was 2004. Chaim and I had become close the previous year while part of a cohort of masters’ students studying International Peace at the University of Notre Dame. That same year, Israel had begun construction on what would become the 440-mile-long, 30-foot-high wall that now snakes in and around the West Bank, which, along with the already walled-in Gaza Strip, had been under a decades-long occupation by Israel’s military. The wall enables the State of Israel to steal a significant amount of desirable land, while cutting Palestinians off from their families, their livelihood, their olive groves, and their freedom.
It was now an election year, and presidential candidates in the U.S. were deliberately obscuring the truth of this apartheid wall—paid for in large part by U.S. citizens’ tax dollars—by referring to it as a mere “separation barrier.” I told Chaim’s friends that I had traveled with fellow Catholic Workers in order to stand with the Palestinians and Israelis who were bravely, steadfastly, and nonviolently resisting the wall’s construction. In the journalistic spirit of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, we would return home to write numerous articles and give dozens of talks about our experiences.
Chaim and his friends were Zionists, meaning that they believed in the right of the Jewish people to establish, develop, and protect Israel as a Jewish-majority state in the land from which they had been exiled 2,000 years ago. Zionism began as a political movement in the late 19th century in response to the long history of anti-semititic policies and violent persecution from which Jews had suffered throughout Europe and elsewhere. As the full extent of the horrors of the Holocaust came to light, Zionism gained increasing support. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly partitioned Palestine—then under British rule—into one Jewish state and one Arab, with a shared capital of Jerusalem. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing that it was unfair to give more than half of the land to Israel when Jews represented only a third of the population, while Palestinian families who had called this land home for centuries would be displaced.
And displaced they were. During the war that followed Israel’s establishment, 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their villages, many of which have completely disappeared off the map. (See Blood Brothers by Bishop Elias Chacour for a personal narrative of this ethnic cleansing.) Today, the five million descendants of those Palestinians who fled are still unable to return to their homes in what is now Israel, scattered instead in a diaspora or living in refugee camps, while Jews born anywhere in the world have the right to become an Israeli citizen. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza continue to be displaced by Israeli military operations, Israeli settlements, land confiscation, evictions, and regular house demolitions.
Despite their Zionism, Chaim and his friends, devout Jews, disagreed with their government’s ongoing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and expressed respect for my commitment to justice and nonviolence rooted in my Catholic faith. Still, they challenged me: “Why would you travel here to protest Israeli settlers’ theft of Palestinian land, when you yourself benefit from the ongoing theft of land from Indigenous people in your country?”
Their challenge struck a chord with me. My ancestors, fleeing poverty, had enthusiastically embraced the myth promoted by European colonial powers that the U.S. had once been “a vast wilderness,” ready for the taking. (Those same colonial powers had insisted that Palestine before 1948 was “a land without a people.”) In both the U.S. and Israel, the new ruling power would use military violence to dispossess Indigenous people of their land. In both the U.S. and Israel, settlers continue to cooperate with the ruling power’s active attempt to destroy one culture and replace it with another.
Read the rest of the essay on the Embracing Repair Substack.
BRIEFLY
Kay Lasante Clinic continues to provide critical support to the Ti Plas Kazo community in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, despite widespread violence in recent weeks, according to an update from House of Grace Catholic Worker (Philadelphia). “The situation in Haiti is dire,” said Mary Beth Appel, adding that the community hopes that calm will return to the country once Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigns. House of Grace Catholic Worker co-founded the clinic in 2005 and continues to sponsor it in partnership with the What If Foundation. The foundation hopes to raise $12,000 by the end of March to support the clinic’s mission; donate here.
The Iowa City Catholic Worker is celebrating a “win” in the defeat of HF2608 in the current legislative session. The bill would have created a new state crime of “smuggling of persons”—language sufficiently vague to threaten charities that provide for the basic needs of undocumented migrants. In an email, the Iowa City Catholic Worker described the bill as “an anti-charity, anti-immigrant law to prohibit immigrants from accessing public benefits and criminalize anyone who transports undocumented immigrants,” and planned to “continue the fight against all anti-immigrant legislation and sentiment in Iowa until we have public policy with a preferential option for the poor.”
The Catholic Left had a profound influence on today's religiously affiliated peace movements, according to an article in this month's Commonweal magazine. The essay recounts how Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Elizabeth McAlister, and other figures on the Catholic Left tangled with J. Edgar Hoover, Henry Kissinger, and the FBI. Read it here: When the FBI Feared the Catholic Left
The latest issue of The Sower is out; the newsletter of Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker in Maloy, Iowa. features a personal reflection on the situation in Gaza along with articles recounting retreats, resistance, and day-to-day life on the farm. Read it at CatholicWorker.org.
Former Catholic Worker Bruce Fredrich was profiled in the Washingtonian, describing his life of activism on behalf of animal rights. He counts his conversion to Catholicism and time at the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C., as a critical part of his life and activism: “It’s essential to who I am and everything about me—I take very seriously ‘Act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.’” Read the full article on the Washingtonian website.
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CW CALENDAR
March 17 | Winona, Minnesota
“Agrarian Spirit” A Winona Roundtable
March 18 | Various locations
Christians Against Genocide Day of Action
March 21 | Virtual Event sponsored by the Maurin Academy
Personalism Roundtable Discussion
March 23 - March 29 | Nevada
Sacred Peace Walk (Nevada Desert Experience)
April 12 - April 15 | Kansas City, Missouri
Midwest Catholic Worker Faith & Resistance Retreat
May 8 - May 12 | Kent, Great Britain
European Catholic Worker Gathering 2024
A FEW GOOD WORDS
Thomas Merton’s Letter to a Young Activist
By Thomas Merton, February 22, 1966
This letter was recommended by Father Tom Lumpkin over the course of my interview, Lumpkin ranks it as one of the most helpful letters he’s ever read. In the midst of the Vietnam war, peace activist Jim Forest wrote to Thomas Merton about his ‘bleak mood’ and seeming powerlessness in the face of the war.
And then this: do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, as you yourself mention in passing, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…
As for the big results, these are not in your hands or mine, but they can suddenly happen, and we can share in them: but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.
So the next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work and your witness. You are using it so to speak to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without you knowing it.
Read the entire letter here: Thomas Merton’s Letter to a Young Activist
Thanks to Zak Sather for editing this week’s newsletter. Thanks, too, to Renee Roden (see her Substack, Sweet Unrest) and Rosalie Riegle for their help with this week’s newsletter. The National Catholic Worker E-mail List provides leads for many of our items.
And a special thanks to our paid subscribers, who make this newsletter possible; special shout out this week to Founding subscribers Tom F., John L., and Paula R.
Roundtable is an independent publication of CatholicWorker.org. It is not affiliated with The Catholic Worker newspaper published by the New York Catholic Worker.
Thanks for the news updates. So much courage and good efforts put a smile on my face!